Former Attorney General Dan Lungren Seeks Sacramento Area Seat in
Congress

By
a MetNews Staff Writer

Former
California Attorney General Dan Lungren yesterday formally announced his
candidacy for a Sacramento-area congressional seat.

Lungren,
who first disclosed his plans to run for the seat of retiring GOP Rep. Doug Ose
a month ago, served in the House from 1979 to 1989. At that time he represented
a district including parts of Los Angeles
and Orange
counties.

Serving
in Congress, he said yesterday in a release, is “a job I know well.”

The
Third Congressional District, where Lungren will run, stretches across the SacramentoValley
and runs to the Nevada
border, taking in all of Alpine, Amador and CalaverasCounties,
all of the rural portions of SacramentoCounty
and a small portion of SolanoCounty.
Those boundaries, reconfigured two years ago, make it highly likely that the
Republican primary winner will capture the seat.

Lungren
is likely to face state Sen. Rico Oller, R-San Andreas, in the primary. While
Lungren was viewed as a solid conservative throughout his tenure as a
congressman and attorney general, some observers in the district have portrayed
Oller as the more conservative of the two.

At
a news conference yesterday, Lungren attacked the “savaging of [state Supreme
Court] Justice Janice Rogers Brown” by opponents of her nomination to the U.S.
Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

“What
they are doing to Janice Rogers Brown is an insult to the people of California,”
Lungren said. In his release, he promised “to be a strong advocate fro the
President’s judicial appointments, particularly those from California.”

House
members have no vote on judicial appointees, who are nominated by the president
and voted on by the Senate.

Lungren,
57, was the Republican nominee for governor in 1998, losing to Democrat Gray
Davis. Lungren also was nominated for state treasurer in 1988 by then-Gov.
George Deukmejian to fill a vacancy created by the death of Jesse Unruh, but
the nomination was rejected by the state Senate after Lungren moved his family
to the Sacramento
area.

He
served as attorney general from 1991 to 1999, winning praise from law
enforcement, victim’s rights advocates, and prosecutors for his stances on criminal
justice issues. He also took strong stands on social issues, opposing abortion
rights and the extension of legalized gambling.